Two very large companies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, dominate the credit-rating industry. These two companies own around 80 per cent of the market. No other significant major competitors exist, though there are companies that rate local securities in places like China and India. In India,...

This paper analyses conditions for rationalizability of rational expectations equilibria of asset market models with asymmetric information and learning from current prices. In such models, traders are asymmetrically informed about the liquidation value of an asset. However, they take into...

We endogenize the trade mechanism in a search economy with many homogenous sellers and many heterogeneous buyers of unobservable type. We study how heterogeneity and the traders’ continuation values which are endogenous influence the sellers’ choice of trade mechanism. Sellers trade off the...

In most Initial Public Offerings (IPO) in the world, the underwriter selects syndicate members and uses the information of their investors' clientele to set the offering price. The objective of this paper is to develop a model of the "book building" process in which the formation of the...

We show that in oligopolistic markets the social choice correspondence which selects all socially efficient outcomes is Nash implementable if the number of firms is at least two. Thus, monopoly regulation whenever consumers are favored by the designer or the society is the only framework, among...

Forecast sharing is studied in a supply chain with a manufacturer that faces stochastic demand for a single product and a supplier that is the sole source for a critical component. The following sequence of events occurs: the manufacturer provides her initial forecast to the supplier along with...

Transparency has become a catchword and in the economic-political debate is often seen as a universal remedy for all sorts of problems. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the meaning and use of the concept of transparency in economic research. We look for common denominators across different...

The art industry is a complex system in which many different actors interact in the production process in different roles and at different stages of the supply chain: artists, dealers, critics, art advisor, collecting societies and other actors who work at different levels in the process of...

Wine is a product characterized by the existence of both significant differences in quality and asymmetric information between producers and consumers. In this context there is a natural incentive for wineries to market poor quality wines. However, evidence shows that wine markets are populated...

The concept of reputation has been used in every field of economic research, given its capacity to affect the outcome of all economic and financial transactions. The theoretical debate on reputation is very rich, but the mechanisms of reputation building have not been explored enough from the...